The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
A local area network (LAN) may include a network switch that forwards packets (i.e., formatted blocks of data) between ports of the LAN. The packets are forwarded based on Media Access Control (MAC) addresses and/or Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the ports in the packets. The network switch includes a plurality of ports that are connected to other ports of the LAN.
Traditional network switches schedule the forwarding of packets once the packets are available, or received. Scheduling the forwarding of packets based on the availability of the packets, however, may increase latency and jitter (i.e., variation in latency) in forwarding packets of streaming audio and/or video (i.e., media). The increase in latency and jitter occurs when packets of streaming media aggregate on an output port with packets of different sizes. The packets of streaming media are required to be forwarded at equal time intervals to serve the media seamlessly. Accordingly, the increase in latency and/or jitter is not desired.